28 May 2011

In 1993, a convicted murderer was executed. His body was given to science, segmented, and photographed for medical research. In 2011, we used photography to put it back together.
Concept by Croix Gagnon. Photography by Frank Schott.

These high-magnification composite photographs are created by combining hundreds of individual images using computer-aided focus stacking and panorama stitching. The result is a dramatic increase in depth of field and resolution, removing the scale cues normally apparent in micro photography.

14 May 2011

American: The Bill Hicks Story (imdb) is a fine, must see documentary for all comedy fans and People of Counterculture. The movie shows us a man who during his own lifetime lived and breathed relentless dedication to speaking hurtful truths to barely receptive small-town comedy club audiences, but was privileged enough to witness the early days of his persona’s journey towards cult-like status.

You can buy your own copy or rent a stream (HD quality available) on the film’s site. A 720p copy can be downloaded illegally over bittorrent.

The documentary is definitely worth its weight in HD bandwidth thanks to a ton of gorgeous animations made from photo cutouts. Lazy, white-trash Finnish fans might however enjoy the free, subtitled low-res copy of the movie on The Finnish Broadcasting Company’s Areena streaming site (25 days of geographically restricted availability left at the time of posting).

1 April 2011

NASA presents an improved infrared image of the Milky Way core, from previous data gathered by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2008. The original image is stitched from 800’000 images Spitzer took during five years. Printed, the image spans 120 by 3 feet, 6 feet at the core buldge. Even at this resolution, the image contains only about 50% of our galaxy.

24 February 2011

Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. [An analogy is the resulting shockwave when exceeding the speed of sound.] The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit [165°C]. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

Hanford Site produced the plutonium for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concentratred most of the plutonium for the US missile warheads.